Gone Feral: Tracking My Dad Through the Wild

by Novella Carpenter

  “What happens when you cut like this is the sun bakes the ground,” Dad said. He paced in front of the clear-cut like he had the night talking about the cops. He was breathing hard and seemed shaken.

  “They’ll come in and burn this,” he said, pointing at the tree shrapnel. “The ground bakes solid as a rock down two feet.” He grabbed his head in his hands. I looked at him, framed in front of the destroyed trees. He took everything so personally. I wondered what had happened to him, what had gone wrong.

  “What a waste,” he said. Then he showed me how he would go in to salvage some of the logs from the pile before they burned it. So this was where he got the wood to sell by the cord—from scrounging after a logging company’s clear-cut.

  He wasn’t an apex predator, I thought, looking at his stricken face. My dad was a bottom-feeder. He hated this clear-cut yet he made a living from it. He couldn’t live in normal society, and so he had to salvage what he could. For my whole life I had imagined him soaring like a hawk, living as one with nature, tall and proud. He was living with nature, but it wasn’t proud and romantic. It was messy and sad.

  • • •

  Bill made eggs and potatoes for dinner that night, and I arranged the last of our dried fruit and my homemade cheese on a plate. Hot, in the tiny kitchen, I was wearing a tank top. My dad came in humming to snatch a piece of cheese from the plate. “Oh, that’s good,” he whistled, and kissed my cheek. I smiled with pride. Then he spotted something on my shoulder, a mole I was born with. He mistook it for a piece of something and picked at it with his thumb and index finger. “It’s a mole,” I told him, my sympathy for him turning to anger. If he had been around, he would have known my moles, I fumed.

  Instead of letting him talk about Satan, I steered Dad toward music, and the guitars he had been building. The big blocks of wood by the door were for making guitars, he explained. While we talked he compulsively cut his fingernails with a pair of clippers down to the quick. Some of them bled.

  I remembered another story that Phil, one of the happy hippies at Farm Out, related to me. There had been a winter party at my parents’ ranch. My mom had organized it, trying to keep the Idaho winter blues at bay. One by one the hippies arrived, forging through the snow, bringing jugs of wine and dishes of food to share. A few, like Phil and a guitar player, John, brought their instruments. After a feast and a few joints, Phil and John got out their instruments and strummed a few folk songs, noodled a little blue grass while the dishes were being washed. They saw my dad’s guitars and asked him to join in. My dad, normally shy, picked up his guitar, a deep golden one, and tuned up. There was a crackling fire, and it had grown dark. He played slowly, quietly, at first—Phil remembered it was a Spanish guitar piece. Soon the entire room was vibrating with the warmth of the guitar, its haunting crescendos and small yelps from my dad guiding the song—being guided by the guitar. “He just blew us away,” Phil told me. “We couldn’t believe we knew anyone that good.”

  Now he had no one to listen to his playing except the trees and the squirrels. Hoping to get him out of his crazy mode, I asked him to play for me like he had played for the hippies, like he had played into my tape recorder in Idaho Falls. But he shook his head and held up his hands.

  “It’s hard to be a woodsman and keep my hands in good condition to play,” Dad explained and showed me his calluses from chopping wood. He couldn’t play now—he would wait until he got to Arizona. His hands represented perfectly his crippling duality—lover of music must work in the woods in order to survive and make music but can’t because the woods are hard on his hands.

  He opened up a guitar case and fished out a half-finished guitar. “I am a student of Bouchet,” he explained, and showed me how he shaped the guitar’s body and attached the neck. The guitar was exquisite, golden, with a carefully inlaid pattern up the neck. It was shockingly beautiful, especially in the squalor of his cabin, as if he had pulled out a diamond necklace from a stinky hobo satchel.

  “Do you want this when I’m finished building it?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, gazing at the beautiful instrument. I couldn’t believe someone’s hands could make such a thing. I felt bad, ungrateful for rejecting his guitar. “I mean, I don’t play, so it will be wasted,” I explained.

  When I was nineteen I had actually taken guitar classes for a few months. My dad sent me letters with cash in them, encouraging me to take lessons. I found a place just off University Avenue in Seattle and attended a one-on-one class with a bespectacled classical guitar teacher. My maestro would give me assignments from a basic classical guitar book—an adagio perhaps—with the idea that I would practice at home and then could play the piece at the next lesson. I wouldn’t study and arrived unprepared, clumsily working my fingers on the strings.

  “Your money,” the teacher would say. But actually it was my dad’s money. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was cash extracted from the forest, hard-won, sweat-covered. Unfortunately, both nature and nurture conspired against me. My father’s musical and linguistic abilities had not passed on to me and I had no dedication. Feeling bitter—sure that I could have been a guitar player if Dad had actually been around and taught me how to play—I stopped going to lessons and admitted defeat.

  “I gave Mother a guitar,” he said proudly. “God almighty it was gorgeous. I think it was the only time she was proud of me,” he said. He went broody, thinking of his failed mother.

  I met Grandmother Jeanne only a few times—my mom made it a point that we would at least know our grandmother. But she was a cold woman who chain-smoked Pall Malls and seemed indifferent to me and my sister. Her house felt like a mausoleum—lifeless and sterile, the exact opposite of Dad. She slept with the radio blaring call-in talk shows. And the only story I remember her telling was the time when she saw a UFO outside of the grocery store. It was purple, with lots of lights. When she was dying from emphysema my sister and I went to her bedside in the hospital. When she saw us her eyes lit up and she scribbled out a note and handed it to me. The note didn’t read “I love you” or “I’m at peace,” like it’s supposed to in the movies. It said, “Oxygen!” and she underlined the word. Dad never reconciled with her, and didn’t attend her funeral.

  I’ve been told that I have Grandmother Jeanne’s eyes and eyebrows. Deep set, with thick, caterpillaring eyebrows. I wondered if it was odd for him to look at me: his estranged daughter with his estranged mother’s eyes.

  I awoke the next morning with a feeling of dread. My father and I were just repeating the mistakes of the past. I couldn’t see a way out of the cycle. I had come here to tell him about my plans to have children. To resolve the issues I had with him before moving on to become a mother. But he wasn’t willing—or able. So perhaps it was with a touch of frustration that I picked a fight with my dad that morning, making it the first brawl in the history of our relationship at ages seventy-four and thirty-seven.

  Somehow we got onto the topic of my mom.

  “I would come home from a ten- to twelve-hour day,” he said, “and I’d come home to her hatred. No dinner. No praise. Just criticism,” Dad said, detailing why my mom didn’t work out as a good wife for him. I sat in the only chair in the house, by the window; Bill was outside, still asleep.

  It was as if their split had happened just days before, his anger was so raw. It set me on edge, flutters of fear rippled down my stomach.

  “So, you weren’t really interested in being a dad?” I asked. It was only after the words came out of my mouth that I felt a choking, blinding anger welling up in me—stored so long, now unleashed.

  Suddenly Dad felt the need to sweep his particleboard floor. “Then she would call Rick, and say she wanted to learn how to cut down trees,” he said, ignoring my question. “She was so competitive.” He kept sweeping. “All she had to do was be a wife, raise you guys, make food, sew, whatever. She could do whatever she wanted, but she had to be co
mpetitive.”

  From my mom’s account of life on the ranch, she hadn’t exactly been living a life of leisure. She chopped wood, kept the woodstove burning, milked the cow, fed the ducks and chickens, breast-fed us, and cleaned the house. That she wanted to help my dad log the land—no doubt for some much needed cash—seemed like a rather generous offer. But I was starting to notice that my dad, wild man that he projected himself as—was just a traditionalist when it came to gender roles. He wanted my mom barefoot, pregnant, and subservient.

  “Then she brought that cretin into our bed,” he snarled. The day of the big fight with the lemonade. My hazy memory of the fight was later explained to me—first by Dad when I was in my twenties. According to Dad, on a fall day in 1975 he had returned to the Rough House after a long absence. He did this often, just disappearing for weeks on end. Duward the carpenter was there and Dad flew into a rage. He and the woodworker had a face-off: Dad pulled a gun, Duward had just a two-by-four. The two men stood, almost touching chests. Finally Dad muttered, “It’s not worth it,” and lowered his gun. Duward turned and ran.

  Then Dad came into the kitchen and Riana and I warded him away from Mom.

  Mom met Duward when she started selling fresh cow milk to the neighbors—she had excess milk and wanted the money to buy building supplies so they could finish the house. Duward was one of her milk customers, and eventually became her boyfriend.

  “You guys were home, and she brought that cretin into our bed,” he shrieked. “I was going to burn the house down,” he said. “Burn everything.”

  Including us. I felt another wave of fear. The neighbor started firing his guns. Loud ricocheting bullet sounds added to our discussion.

  My fear morphed into a red-hot rage. “Why are you blaming me for something between my mom and you?” I yelled. I wondered if Bill, sleeping in the tent, would hear our argument.

  My dad started crying. A deep shuddering cry. He leaned against his broom. “We just need to forgive each other,” he said.

  My hackles rose. Wait a minute, this man had abandoned me, and I should be asking for forgiveness?

  “I don’t think you have anything to forgive me for,” I yelled and stood up. “I haven’t done anything wrong.” Then I thought about Bill and our future children and blurted out, “I know that if I had a kid, I wouldn’t fucking abandon it like you did to us. And neither would Bill!” Even as I said it, I wasn’t sure I believed it.

  I went into the kitchen and started throwing stuff around, grabbed our kitchen supplies, and threw them into the camping box. There were two identical cast iron pans on the stove. One was coated with egg from last night’s dinner. I grabbed the clean one.

  I walked outside with our stuff, fuming. Bill was just emerging from the tent, hair tousled. I tossed the camping box of food into the backseat of the car. “We’re leaving!” I yelled to Bill. My dad stood on the porch, watching. I stuffed my sleeping bag and grabbed the Therm-a-Rests from under Bill and carried them to the car.

  Bill slowly started to break down the tent, but he wasn’t moving fast enough for me. I bumped him out of the way. “Go start the car,” I huffed. I pulled the tent down and, not bothering to fold it, threw the whole thing into the backseat.

  The Benz roared to life with a puff of smoke, and we were backing up out of George Carpenter’s driveway.

  After a few miles of driving, Bill cleared his throat. “Things didn’t go well?”

  We were at a four-way stop, about to turn onto the main road. Back on the road, mission oh so unsuccessful.

  “My dad’s a fucking asshole,” I spit. “He’s a nut job. What the hell is wrong with him?”

  “He did seem really out there,” Bill said, trying to calm me down. He eased the car forward, and we heard a terrible clunking noise.

  The car stalled in the middle of the intersection.

  “Oh, shit,” Bill muttered.

  “What? What?” I said. Were we breaking down? I leaped out of the car and we pushed it onto the side of the road. Bill started the engine but the car couldn’t go forward. He crawled under the car to take a look and instructed me to shift the gears.

  “It’s the rear tail shaft,” he said grimly, scooting out.

  We sat in the car. He knew because he had just worked on a customer’s vehicle that needed a new tail shaft in the transmission and he recognized the sound. We could tow it into town, but the part is rare—a 1976 Mercedes Benz rear tail shaft?

  “The funny thing is,” Bill said, “I have two at our house.” He had brought a spare alternator, headlights, and an extra battery, but didn’t think we’d need a rear tail shaft.

  Then I saw a truck pull up behind us. My heart sank—Dad.

  He jumped out of his truck and went into hero mode. Without a word, he grabbed a big chain out of the back of his truck, hitched it to our car, then pulled his truck around and connected it.

  “I know a guy in town,” he said. I knew that Dad would have done this for anyone with car trouble, it wasn’t just because I was his daughter. It’s part of Idaho life: If you see someone who needs help, you help. On the day I was born, Mom was driving herself to the hospital when the rear axle fell off the Jeep. A kindly Idaho stranger stopped to save the day.

  Dad towed us fourteen miles to Village Auto, a little shop by the Clearwater River. He went in to talk to Dan, the owner of the shop. Dan agreed Bill could use his garage to fix the car for a small sum. My dad unchained the truck, then tipped his hat, Clint Eastwood style, and drove away.

  We were stuck in Orofino.

  Retracing my parents’ footsteps, Novella and Bill in Mexico, 1998.

  Seven

  Bill and I drank some jasmine tea and dipped our feet in the Clearwater River. We were at a campground just outside of Orofino called the Pink House Hole, which, to me, sounded vaguely vaginal. The hole had been a favorite fishing spot for locals before they tore down the eponymous pink house and turned it into an official recreation site. Fourteen bucks a night. I wasn’t going to go back to my dad’s house—and I doubt I would be invited back. Bill figured it would be two days before our part arrived.

  “Want to go for a walk?” Bill asked.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We found ourselves along some railroad tracks. Picking blackberries. “We could’ve slept here,” Bill said, pointing to a nest of brambles. Bill has always wanted to be a hobo. His aesthetic—ripped clothes, dirty T-shirts—is pure bum.

  His scruffiness was one of the first things I liked about him when he got on an elevator with me in Seattle in 1998. I was twenty-five, working on the UW campus for Classroom Support Services. After seven on and off years of college, I had finally graduated and had lingered around campus working as an AV tech, paid small sums of money to push PLAY on VCRs for classes. In the elevator, Bill, a new employee, recently arrived from Florida, was wearing a too-small blue sweatshirt and a red mohair hat that slumped over his lush dark hair. I sported a peeling turquoise pleather jacket and horn-rimmed glasses. He seemed nervous, which I liked. Later he sent me an e-mail that said I was intriguing and he asked me out. Our first date involved meeting in a back alley to eat sardines balanced on saltine crackers we had filched from the student cafeteria. We moved in together after the second date.

  Channeling my parents, our first winter together Bill and I traveled to Mexico. After some time in Oaxaca, on my insistence, we headed to San Miguel de Allende. Bill and I arrived by a Semi-Directo bus. So this is where my parents met? I thought, filled with emotion when the bus pulled into the ancient town, the giant cathedral curlicuing up to the blue Mexican sky. This is where it all started.

  Overcome with the weight of the past and its implications, I missed the last step off the bus and tumbled—a twenty-five-year-old gringa, giant yellow backpack strapped on like a beetle’s carapace, spinning through the air, trying to regain my footing. I landed with a thud on t
he cobblestones. The bus driver laughed, he couldn’t help himself. Bill tried not to do the same, and carried me to the youth hostel. I was distraught, and sat with my foot up in the hostel’s common room, immobilized. Bill went out to explore, and when he came back he said there were lots of Americans living there. It was no longer the undiscovered oasis of my parents’ youth.

  We left a few days later. I limped onto the bus and we headed to the coast where I could heal up. Propped up at the beach, I felt like a failure. Not just because I hadn’t gotten to explore the town where my parents first met but because my future seemed so dingy and uninspiring compared to my parents’ younger years.

  • • •

  It was in that winter, 1998, just after our failed San Miguel de Allende trip, that Bill met my dad for the first time.

  We were in Bill’s VW, driving through the Southwest. I had unfolded a map of Arizona, a cup of coffee between my legs; Bill was smoking a hand-rolled Drum cigarette. “Hey, we’re near Wickenburg!” I said.

  “So?” Bill answered. The cactus-filled landscape seemed to go on forever.

  “I think my dad’s there,” I said, remembering that he sent me a postcard mentioning that he was staying at the Purple Hills Apartments. I was learning to be a writer then, and his life seemed a proper one for an artist. I heavily romanticized his decision to never join mainstream America. I had been bragging to Bill about my cool dad, playing down the fact that we were estranged. I hadn’t seen him for more than an hour since 1984. “Let’s go see him!” Bill said. I smiled. Bill was writing poetry then, he was thin as a rail.

  We pulled into the dusty parking lot of the Purple Hills Apartments. I stared at the buildings. One of the “apartments” was a teepee staked in the backyard. I figured the teepee had to be my dad’s. I climbed out of the bus and stood near the entrance, trying to determine how to knock on the door of a teepee.

  Before I could make an attempt, he came out of apartment number 3 in his socks, perplexed about the wheezing VW bus in his parking lot.